Brain Full, Body Tired

This weekend is the third annual Benjamin Lo workshop in Logan, Utah. I got up at five this morning, because I never received word about what time it was starting. I got here around 7:40...and found out we didn't actually start until 10. Ah well. I had time to do some warmups and yoga beforehand.

I found out something that I didn't know about bow stance in the first two hour session. Bow stance, in a nutshell, has shoulder width, one foot in front of the other, back foot at forty five degrees. Seventy percent of the weight should be on the front foot (which requires squaring the hips to the front foot and bending the hip joints); thirty percent should be on the back foot. There was a session last night that I missed, but someone who was there made the observation that when he watched the senior students, their back legs went straight down from their hips, in line with their bodies. Ben Lo said that was a good observation, and I find that it is easier to keep my back knee in line with my toes that way. It also...works my ankle differently, and the ankle bends a lot more easily in that direction than it did with what I'd been doing before. As far as I'm concerned, that insight alone was worth the price of the workshop.

And it got better. We broke off form work during the afternoon session to push hands. I pushed with several people, all reasonably good. As in, good enough that they could get away from many of my pushes, and they sometimes pushed me out. There's something to learn from ANYone at push hands, but someone way better than me or way worse will get either frustrating or boring after a while.

Tonight I'm in a Best Western near the workshop (though tomorrow we're meeting in a different place; the usual place has acquired some new church groups who use the space on Sundays). And now it's time to find food and go wandering. There's a Borders here that sometimes gets stuff sooner than Idaho bookstores, and has a different selection than any of my regular bookstore haunts. So, uh, food now... Before I get too hungry to realize I'm hungry.